Because of this, "Uncertain and afraid" strikes you all the more with its absence of anything concrete: no nouns, not even numbers; just two adjectives like two little fountains of panic surging in your stomach. The shift of diction from public to private is quite abrupt, and those open vowels in the beginning of this line's only two words leave you breathless and alone against the concrete stability of the world whose length doesn't stop at Fifty-second Street. The state that this line denotes isn't one of mind, obviously. The poet, however, tries to produce a rationale having, presumably, no desire to slip into whatever abyss his home- lessness may invite him to glance at. This line could just as well have been dictated by the sense of his incongruity with the immediate surroundings (by the sense of one's flesh's incongruity with any surroundings, if you like). I would even venture to suggest that this sense was permanently present in this poet; it's simply his personal or, as is the case with this poem, historical circumstances that were making it more acute.
So he is quite right here to grope for a rationale for the described state. And the whole poem grows out of these gropings. Well, let's watch what is going on:
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade . . .
To begin with, a considerable portion of his English audience gets it in the neck here. "The clever hopes" stands here for a lot of things: for pacifism, appeasement, Spain, Munich—for all those events that paved the road to Fascism in Europe more or less in the same fashion as the road to Communism is paved there in our time by Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Poland. Speaking of the last, September 1, 1939, which gave our poem its title, is the day when the German troops invaded Poland and World War II began. (Well, a little bit of history shouldn't hurt, should it?) The war, you see, began over the British guarantees of Polish independence. That was the CMUS belli. Now it's 1981, and where is that Polish independence today, forty years later? So, strictly, legally speaking, World War II was in vain. But I'm digressing ... At any rate, these guarantees were British, and this epithet still meant something to Auden. To say the least, it could still imply home, and hence the lucidity and harshness of his attitude toward "clever hopes."
Still, the main role of this conjunction is the hero's attempt to quell the panic by rationalization. And that would do were it not for "clever hopes" being a contradiction in terms: it is too late for a hope if it is clever. The only quelling aspect of this expression comes from the word "hope" itself, since it implies a future invariably associated with improvement. The net result of this oxymoron is clearly satirical. And yet under the circumstances, satire is, on one hand, almost unethical and, on the other hand, not enough. So the author lowers his fist with "Of a low dishonest decade," which spans all those aforementioned instances of yielding to brute force. But before we get into this line, note the epigrammatic quality of "dishonest decade": thanks to the similarity of stresses and the common opening consonant, "dishonest" constitutes a sort of mental rhyme for "decade." Well, this is perhaps watching things too closely for their own good.
Now, why do you think Auden says "low dishonest decade"? Well, partly because the decade indeed had sunk very low—because as the apprehension about Hitler grew, so did the argument, especially on the Continent, that somehow everything was going to work out all right. After all, all those nations rubbed shoulders too long, not to mention the carnage of World War I still fresh in their memories, to conceive the possibility of yet another shooting session. To many of them that would have seemed sheer tautology. This is the type of mentality best described by the great Polish wit Stanislaw Jerzy Lec (whose Unkempt Thmights Auden adored greatly) in the following observation: "A hero who survived tragedy isn't a tragic hero." Cute as it may sound, the sick thing is that a hero often survives one tragedy to die in another. Hence, in any case, those "clever hopes."
By adding "low dishonest decade" Auden produces the effect of being deliberately judgmental. In general, when a noun gets more than one adjective, especially on paper, we become slightly suspicious. Normally, this sort of thing is done for emphasis, but the doer knows it is risky. This, by the way, raises a parenthetical comment: in a poem, you should try to reduce the number of adjectives to a minimum. So that if somebody covers your poem with a magic cloth that removes adjectives, the page will still be black enough because of nouns, adverbs, and verbs. "'hen that cloth is little, your best friends are nouns. Also, never rhyme the same parts of specch. Nouns you can, verbs you shouldn't, and rhyming adjectives is taboo.
By 1939 Auden is enough of an old hand to know this thing about two or more adjectives and yet he does exactly this with these epithets which, on top of everything else, are both pejorative. Why, do you think? In order to condemn the decade? But "dishonest" would have been enough. Besides, righteousness wasn't in Auden's character, nor would it escape him that he was a part of that decade himself. A man like him wouldn't employ a negative epithet without sensing a touch of self-portrayal in it. In other words, whenever you are about to use something pejorative, try to apply it to yourself to get the full measure of the word. Other than that, your criticism may amount simply to getting unpleasant things out of your system. Like nearly every self- therapy, it cures little . . . No, I think the reason for using the adjectives in a row was the poet's desire to supply the rational revulsion with physical gravity. He simply wants to seal this line for good, and the heavy, one-syllabled "low" does it. The trimeter is employed here in hammerlike fashion. He could have said "sick" or "bad"; "low," however, is more stable and it also reverberates with the seedi- ness of the dive. We deal here not only with the ethical but also with the actual urban topography, as the poet wants to keep the whole thing on street level.
Waves of anger aid fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives . . .
The "waves" are obviously those of radio broadcasts, although the position of the word—right after "dishonest decade" and at the beginning of a new sentence—promises you relief, a change of pitch; so originally a reader is inclined to take "waves" in a romantic key. Well, because a poem sits in the very middle of the page surrounded by the enormity of white margins, each word of it, each comma carries an enormous—i.e., proportionate to the abundance of unused space—burden of allusions and significances. Its words are simply overloaded, especially those at the beginning and at the end of the line. It ain't prose. It's like a plane in a white sky, and each bolt and rivet matter greatly. And that's why we are going over each one of them . . . Anyhow, "anger and fear" are presumably the substance of those broadcasts: the German invasion of Poland and the world's reaction to it, including the British declaration of war against Germany. It could be precisely the contrast of those reports with the American scene that made our poet assume his newsman posture here. In any case, it's this allusion to the press that is responsible for the choice of the verb "circulate" in the next line; but only partly.
The party more directly responsible for this verb is the word "fear" at the end of the previous line, and not only because of the generally recurring nature of this sensation but because of the incoherence associated with it. "Waves of anger and fear" is pitched a bit too high above the controlled, level diction of the previous lines, and the poet decides to undercut himself with this technical or bureaucratic, at any rate dispassionate, "circulate." And because of this impersonal, technical verb, he can safely—i.e., without risking an air of emotional superficiality—employ those allusion-laden epithets "bright and darkened," which depict both the actual and the political physiognomy of the globe.